Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

styled-components VS UI Playbook

Compare styled-components VS UI Playbook and see what are their differences

styled-components logo styled-components

styled-components is a visual primitive for the component age that also helps the user to use the ES6 and CSS to style apps.

UI Playbook logo UI Playbook

The documented collection of UI components
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27
  • UI Playbook Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-17

styled-components features and specs

  • Component-Scoped Styling
    Styles are encapsulated within components, ensuring that styles do not leak or conflict with other parts of the application.
  • Dynamic Styling
    Enables dynamic styling with the help of JavaScript variables and props, allowing for highly customizable components.
  • CSS Syntax
    Allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript, making it easier for those familiar with CSS to adapt.
  • Automatic Vendor Prefixing
    Automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS properties, ensuring cross-browser compatibility without additional configuration.
  • Theming Support
    Provides a built-in theming solution, making it easier to implement and switch between different themes in the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering
    Supports server-side rendering, improving initial page load times and SEO.

Possible disadvantages of styled-components

  • Bundle Size
    Styled-components can add to the overall bundle size, potentially affecting performance, especially in large projects.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires developers to learn the styled-components library and its API, which can be a hurdle for new team members or those unfamiliar with CSS-in-JS.
  • Performance Overhead
    The runtime cost of parsing and injecting styles can impact performance, particularly in larger applications or with frequent style changes.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While improving, the ecosystem around styled-components (e.g., linting, debugging) is not as mature as traditional CSS or CSS preprocessor tools.
  • CSS-in-JS Limitations
    Some CSS features, like advanced selectors or cascading, may be more cumbersome or less intuitive to implement compared to traditional CSS approaches.

UI Playbook features and specs

  • Comprehensive Guide
    UI Playbook offers a thorough and well-organized guide on user interface principles, providing valuable insights and best practices for designers at all levels.
  • Accessible Format
    The information is presented in a simple, easy-to-understand format, making it accessible to a wide range of users, from beginners to seasoned professionals.
  • Visual Examples
    The playbook includes visual examples that help in better understanding the implementation of UI concepts, making it easier to grasp complex ideas quickly.
  • Free Resource
    Being a free resource allows anyone to access high-quality information without any financial barrier, which is beneficial for students and novice designers.
  • Community Contribution
    Open to contributions from the community, allowing continuous improvement and updates based on the latest design trends and user feedback.

Possible disadvantages of UI Playbook

  • Limited Depth
    Some users may find the content lacking in depth, as it primarily focuses on basic and intermediate concepts rather than advanced UI design strategies.
  • Technical Limitations
    While the playbook is excellent for visual guidance, it lacks specific technical implementations and code snippets that developers may need.
  • Design Opinion Bias
    The guidance provided might reflect specific design philosophies that do not cater to all styles or industries, potentially limiting its adaptability.
  • Update Frequency
    As a freely accessible tool relying on community updates, it might not always reflect the very latest industry changes as quickly as premium platforms.
  • Navigation Challenges
    Users may find navigating through the large amount of content challenging, especially if they're searching for specific information among multiple sections.

Analysis of styled-components

Overall verdict

  • Styled-components is considered a good choice for many React projects, especially for large applications where modularity and maintainability of styles are important. It has a strong community, extensive documentation, and is widely adopted in the industry.

Why this product is good

  • Styled-components is a popular library for styling React applications. It allows developers to write CSS-in-JS, which means that styles are written in JavaScript and scoped to individual components. This approach offers several benefits, such as easier style management, dynamic styling capabilities, and the ability to leverage JavaScript's full power for styles. Styled-components also supports theming, making it easier to develop consistent design systems.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking to implement a consistent design system with theming capabilities
  • Large-scale React applications where component-based styling is essential
  • Projects that require dynamic styling based on props or state
  • Teams familiar with or willing to adopt a CSS-in-JS approach

styled-components videos

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UI Playbook videos

Vdo UI playbook

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to styled-components and UI Playbook)
Developer Tools
79 79%
21% 21
Design Tools
65 65%
35% 35
User Experience
0 0%
100% 100
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, styled-components seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 170 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

styled-components mentions (170)

  • The CSS Odyssey: Why I Turned back to CSS After Trying Everything Else
    Diving into CSS-in-JS wasn't really a technical choice. My wife, as a UX designer, had good words about Material Design, so I headed to MUI without thinking too much. At that time, Emotion was the first-class citizen there. Meanwhile, my company's UI component library chose styled-components for styling. Both are widely used CSS-in-JS libraries. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • 11 Interview Questions You Should Know as a React Native Developer in 2025 📈🚀
    Using the same CSS-in-JS approach as React, you can use libraries like Styled Components to style your components. This allows you to write CSS directly in your JavaScript files (personally not a fan of using these). - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • CSS-in-JS: Pros and cons
    The 2016 release of styled-components popularized the approach, offering a clean syntax and React integration. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Woovi monorepos best practices
    This detail implies if any dependencies can be resolved correctly and if not have a version conflict. As the example we have the styled-components lib, it can have a problem with type Symbol reference where the library doesn´t find your properties of themes because, in your internal code, it uses the symbolObject which is a unique object that refers your set configs. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: Styled Components Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

UI Playbook mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of UI Playbook yet. Tracking of UI Playbook recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing styled-components and UI Playbook, you can also consider the following products

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Ant Design System for Figma - A large library of 2100+ handcrafted UI components

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

Ant Design - An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

UserInterface.io - Weekly UI/UX tips in your inbox for free